The Arab Spring of Lies

This essay argues that the Arab Spring was essentially an anti-imperialist revolt, not a rebellion against domestic despotism per se - as claimed by bourgeois media and academia.
This is Chapter Five of "The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya". The book, soon to be released, contends the Arab Spring was really a smokescreen for regime change in Libya.

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THE ARAB SPRING OF LIES

This is Chapter Five of a forthcoming book:

“The Dialectic and the Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya”

By Julian Samboma, eBeefs.com, March 2018

“Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but whatthey do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historicalmovement that gave them birth.” Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy

I. THE TUNISIAN REVOLT

The “Arab Spring” is a term coined by Western media to refer to the wave of mass protestsand uprisings which rocked several nations in the Middle East and North Africa from late2010. Others have referred to them as the “Arab Revolutions”.

Tunisia was the first to erupt, on 18 December 2010, followed by Egypt, on 25 January 2011.i, ii The governments of both countries, which incidentally flank Libya on the north-west andthe east respectively, were toppled within a month of the commencement of the uprisings.

Generally considered to have taken hold in six countries – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria,Bahrain and Yemen – the so-called Arab Spring is alleged by sundry academics,commentators and reporters to have been a series of spontaneous, grassroots “revolutions”against authoritarian governments in the region. iii

Given that the street protests in Libya followed immediately upon the heels of the revolts thattoppled the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, these learned people jumpedon a bandwagon emblazoned with the legend: “Libya – an outgrowth of Tunisia and Egypt”.

In a perfect example of this, one writer, states: “The 2011 Arab Spring seems to offer newevidence of a domino theory – one event spurring another event. Libyan youth, inspired bythe toppling of two long-time dictators in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt in January andFebruary, started peaceful protests to pressure Muammar Gaddafi to leave”. iv

Not surprisingly, we find the old canard about “peaceful protests” here again. However, whatpreoccupies us now is this forging (fudging?) of a link between the uprisings in Tunisia andEgypt, on the one hand, and the Libya protests, on the other. Were the latter actuallymanifestations of this Arab Spring. In fact, what exactly was this phenomenon called theArab Spring?

To answer this question we need to conduct a dialectical examination of the Arab Spring andsee what conclusions spring up (pun intended!). It follows that the Arab Spring represents 2

Marx’s “chaotic whole”, “the real-concrete” in this investigation into the Arab Spring. Wewill abstract for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt; we will call them, respectively, theTunisian Revolt and the Egyptian Revolt.

We should mention from the outset that we are not giving any noteworthy consideration tothe uprisings in the other Arab countries. This is because, although dialecticalinterconnections may exist between all of them, those uprisings took place after the Libyanuprising and, therefore, could have no conceivable bearing on the genesis of the latter. (Also,we will be referring to the “Tunisian Revolt of 2011” – as opposed to 2010, when theuprising actually started. This is done for analytical convenience, as the uprisings in Egyptand Libya started in 2011. In any event, ex-president Ben Ali fled the country in 2011.)

The uprising in Tunisia was triggered after Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed graduateselling vegetables, set himself on fire when his inventory was seized by police. After days oflocalised protests, another jobless man protested by electrocuting himself in the same town,Sidi Bouzid, where figures, according to the London Guardian, revealed an unemploymentrate of 25% for male and 44% for female graduates.v

For the Tunisian Revolt, we abstract from the common sense perception – abetted bymainstream media – that the uprising was a reaction against domestic dictatorship, andexamine instead the part which poverty and economic hardship played in triggering the socialupheaval.

As those initial protests unfolded, images of demonstrations and heavy-handed security

measures by the authorities were deployed on social media to organise more and increasinglylarger protests and demonstrations across the capital, Tunis, and other urban centres. Theyeventually tipped the by-now tottering government over the edge and the president had to fleethe country.vi

Well into February, over a month after Ben Ali fled the country, protesters called for a “dayof rage”, to force the resignation of the new prime minister.vii

If you were beginning to suspect that the uprising may have been triggered primarily bypoverty and economic matters than by anything else, then you are on the right track. In 2016,five years after Tunisia’s so-called revolution, London’s Financial Times reported that thedeath of another young man in the Kasserine district of Tunis had triggered protests like thoseof the so-called Arab Spring.

The article said: “Thousands took to the streets in the region’s towns for several days inscenes reminiscent of the 2011 Tunisian revolution, which was also triggered by the death ofa young man amid frustration over joblessness and corruption.” viii

The above article by the Guardian mentions a so-called “devil’s pact” under which Tunisianshad for many years tolerated autocratic rule as long as their economic needs were met. Weshould also add that the Ben Ali regime comprehensively tackled the threat from radicalIslam. This strategy relied heavily on strong and often heavy-handed security tactics, whichalso came in handy when the target was secular political dissent. 3

That this so-called devil’s pact had broken down and the government had fallen back on thesecurity establishment to hold things down is reasonable conjecture. A corollary of this wasthat, if at all the opposite had been the case previously, the people’s economic needs werecertainly not being met by the regime at the time of the uprising.

The aggressive implementation of IMF-imposed policies had caused havoc on the economyand led directly to the impoverishment of millions of people. ix Unlike some other countriesin the region, Tunisia does not have oil revenues with which to bribe its impoverished massesinto docility. As a result there is a consistent record of anti-austerity protest in the country,most notably the Bread Riots of 1984 and labour union-led unrest in the 1990s and in 2008. x

If we now conceive our unit of analysis, the Tunisian Revolt, as a Marxian Relationextending backward and forward in time, its historical character suddenly becomes clear, forit can be traced back decades to union-organised strikes and demonstrations againstgovernment economic policies – policies which have meant successive series ofideologically-driven privatisations of state enterprises, and the epidemic levels of masssackings that attend them; the Relation can also be projected forward to protests anddemonstrations which have taken place since the so-called revolution.

We have already mentioned the “Bread Riots” of 1984, which followed massive hikes inprices of basic foodstuffs after the then government implemented imperialist-imposed“economic reforms”. xi Those unrests were spearheaded by the General Union of TunisianWorkers, the UGTT, as was the 1978 General Strike, which was to protest growingunemployment rates and declining living standards of the working people. xii, xiii

One consequence of the Ben Ali government’s heavy-handed security measures againstmilitant Islamism during the 1990s and early 2000s was a clampdown on civil unrest, whichmeant there were few anti-government protests and demonstrations in that period.

That slack, however, was picked up in 2008 – and again in early 2010 – when the UGTT ledanti-austerity demonstrations in the country’s Gafsa mining region. xiv From the foregoingwe can see that the when conceived as a Relation, the historical character of the TunisianRevolt extends backward to the Gafsa protests of early 2010 and 2008, and then further backto the 1984 “Bread Riots” and the General Strike of 1978.

After that, we can extend the Relation forward in time, to arrive at the Kasserine riots ofMarch 2016 against poverty, unemployment and corruption, as reported in theaforementioned Financial Times article. Still extending the Relation forward, we arrive attoday’s Tunisia, where, from 3 January 2018 – the 34th anniversary of the 1984 Bread Riots –the country was rocked by more than two weeks of violent protests, triggered once again byeconomic concerns, this time against increases in bread and grain prices blamed on IMFeconomic diktat. xv

So, even if our friend the Sceptic had tried to limit the historical character of the TunisianRevolt of 2011 by arbitrarily imposing a cut-off point at the 2008 labour unrests, the sufferingmasses have made it unequivocally clear that the 1984 Bread Riots represent an earlier 4

moment in the perpetual process of anti-imperialist resistance, whose outward appearance is

protest – and violence – against the local agents and symbols of international capital.

As the protesters of the 2018 Bread Riots don the old costumes and slogans of the 1984Bread Rioteers, we may recall Marx’s remarks in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that“the awakening of the dead… served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not ofparodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from itssolution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walkagain”.xvi

We can now see very clearly that the 1978 Tunisian General Strike, the 1984 Bread Riots, thelabour unrests of 2008 and early 2010, the Kasserine riots of 2016 and the 2018 Bread Riotsare all, each and every one of them, expressions of the Tunisian Revolt of 2011 looked atfrom different vantage points. Or, which is another way of expressing the same thought, theyare all moments in the same process.

As we saw in our study of the 2011 Libyan protests, the appearance or form of the Relationswill change over time, given their immanent contradictions and interconnections, exhibiting adifferent phenomenal form at various moments in the process of their mutual interaction. Buttheir essence will remain identical. That essence, as we have demonstrated above using thedialectic, is the destruction of imperialism, mediated through an assault on its local structuresand representatives.

Tunisia was therefore a tinderbox on a countdown to ignition; the spark was provided, quiteliterally, when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight. In essence, the revolt was not aclamour for Western-style, one--person/one-vote democracy, nor was it a reaction againstPresident Ben Ali, the neocolonial presiding officer.

On the contrary, it was a reaction against the neoliberal economic diktat of internationalcapitalism.

I. THE EGYPTIAN REVOLT

It was universally reported in bourgeois, or Western corporate media that what was takingplace in the land of the pharaohs in early 2011 was an uprising against bloody, entrencheddictatorship. It all started on 25 January, we were told, after people responded to socialmedia calls for a so-called “day of rage” against the Mubarak regime.

Here is a typical report, from the London Telegraph, on the same week the revolt erupted:“After nearly 30 years of dictatorial rule, Hosni Mubarak has begun to make concessions.The question is whether the sacking of his cabinet and his promise of reform will assuage hisopponents or merely amplify their call for his removal.”xvii 5

The reason for the protests, the article goes on to enlighten us, is the “decades of repressiveand corrupt rule which has failed to create sufficient jobs”. When we take another randomarticle from another imperialist-friendly organ we find yet another offering based on the sametemplate.

A fellow called Duncan Green wrote a piece for the Guardian about “what caused therevolution in Egypt”. In his lofty opinion, the revolt was a reaction to repression and“torture”.xviii He dances around the principal cause so much that you wonder whether he wasdizzy by the time he finished this offering. Blaming everything from repression and Mafia-style rule to corruption, joblessness, foreign policy and, yes, torture, we were left ponderingwhy he didn’t just chuck in the kitchen sink while he was at it.

Reading these misguided, fallacious and reactionary offerings, the message a tourist fromMars would send to folks back home is that the people in the land of the pharaohs were veryunhappy because one of the pharaohs’ children, a very bad man called Mu-Barak, wasrefusing to vacate the royal palace. And, to cap it all, he was not giving them work, waslocking them up and spending too much money on his family and friends.

In accordance with our dialectical methodology, we do not trust these hand-me-down

conclusions from our good friends in the bourgeois media. Following that methodology, ournext abstraction, the Egyptian Revolt, will treat political repression as but a phenomenal, orcosmetic, aspect of the uprising, and abstract for economic hardship as the dominant factordriving popular discontent in the country.

After trawling the public record, we came upon an item on the website of the Qatari-based,imperialist-friendly news channel, Aljazeera. Once in a while – and in spite of themselves –they do report the truth! The item said that the Egyptian people were protesting “againstpoverty, unemployment, government corruption and the rule of President Hosni Mubarak,who has been in power for three decades”. xix

There was certainly a ring of truth about this, given that it not only gave primacy to economicmotivating factors, but also placed autocratic government last in a list of the protesters’grievances. This accords with the driving force in our abstraction being primarily economicin nature.

Not wanting to be accused of succumbing to Vulgar Marxism or “economic determinism”,

we must emphasise that we are not highlighting the economic to the exclusion of otherfactors. We are simply saying that, although other factors may have played a role, poverty, oreconomic hardship, was the primary motive force. This position is in accord with thedialectic; it is analogous to the dialectical axiom that a complex process has one primary ormain contradiction, although it is subject to other, secondary contradictions.

We saw earlier that, for Marx, to grasp the concept of capital was to see capital as a historicalevent conditioned by a particular set of circumstances. Thus, our method demands that, as inthe case of the Tunisian Revolt, we treat the Egyptian Revolt as a Relation that extends 6

backward and forward in time. The public record again provides us with previous instancesof anti-government protests which were rooted in economic grievances.

As in Tunisia, Egypt had been reeling from the consequences IMF so-called structuraladjustment programmes, which hinged on privatisations, massive sackings and drastic cuts inspending on healthcare and education. Their impact on a rapidly growing population alreadyexperiencing galloping youth unemployment is open to reasonable conjecture.

The impact of rapid population growth cannot be overestimated. During the 30-year rule ofMubarak, the population nearly doubled, reaching a staggering 76 million people. Theneocolonial economy could not support this level of growth. xx

The popular response to increasing poverty in the country was a series of trade union-ledstrikes from 2006 to 2008. In 2006 alone, according to a report by Canada’s Centre for SocialJustice (CSJ), tens of thousands of workers were involved in 220 major strikes anddemonstrations – the largest strike wave in decades. xxi

Protests and demonstrations against increasing poverty and declining living standards havecontinued under the new, “post-revolutionary” political dispensation. This is explained bythe fact that the economic situation has worsened since the fall of Mubarak. According tofigures from 2013, 25% of Egyptians live below the poverty line, with 24% hovering justabove it. xxii The trend continues to this day.

In August 2012 several revolutionary organisations, including the Egyptian Communist

Party, called for a protest against an IMF loan agreement. xxiii And only last year, so-called“Bread Riots” broke out across the country, in March 2017, after the government cut foodsubsidies as a condition to secure an IMF loan. xxiv Just in case you were wondering, therewas a previous Egyptian “Bread Riot”, this time in 1977. xxv

And, surprise of surprises: “The [1977 Bread] riots were a spontaneous uprising by hundredsof thousands of lower-class people protesting World Bank and International Monetary Fund-mandated termination of state subsidies on basic foodstuffs.” xxvi

Here again, exactly 40 years after the first Bread Riots, we see the masses appropriating theold costumes and slogans of the first bread riots to inspire contemporary struggles, just as wesaw in the Tunisian case.

As to local feelings about the IMF, Caroline Freund, former chief regional economist at theWorld Bank, the IMF’s partner-in-crime, said: “[T]he view on the Egyptian street of the IMFwas not positive. You can see that from the Gallup polls, the public don’t want an IMFprogramme.”xxvii

Based on these material facts of anti-IMF, anti-austerity popular activism, we can perceivethe historical character of the Egyptian Revolt as extending way back to the original EgyptianBread Riots of 1977 – which happened three years before Mubarak became president – andthen extending forward in time to the “post-revolutionary” protests of 2012 and the 2017Bread Riots after his downfall. 7

Just as labour and capital are expressions of the same relation seen from opposite sides, so the2011 Egyptian uprising – when perceived as a Marxian Relation from different poles –becomes the 1977 Bread Riots, the 2006-2008 labour union protests against IMFconditionalities, and the anti-government protests that have been fought since Mubarak’s exit.

They are all moments in a singular process. Not only are they dialectically interconnected,these Relations also share an identity as anti-IMF protests, in other words, manifestations ofthe class struggle against international capital. They all have this defining characteristic,which goes back to their origins in a particular set of conditions – one defined by povertyresulting from discredited neoliberal policies. In a word, their essence is anti-imperialist.

Three paragraphs above we highlighted the fact that, as an abstracted Relation, the Egyptian“Revolution” of 2011 (incarnated as the 1977 Bread Riots) took place three years beforeMubarak became president, and again after he was removed from office (incarnated as the2012 anti-austerity protests, and as the 2017 Bread Riots).

If anything, this simple fact demonstrates the objective reality that the so-called Egyptian“revolution” was, in essence, not a revolt against the political dictatorship of Mubarak, butrather a revolt against the economic dictatorship of imperialism. Further, this “simple” fact,which was previously “hidden” from common sense, has been stripped butt-naked by thejudicious deployment of the Marxian dialectic.

This is as true of the Tunisian Revolt as it is of the Egyptian variant. Imperialism and itsmass media and academia – “bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors” – have performedall manner of intellectual acrobatics to convince us that they were “only” revolts againstautocracy. On the other hand, some of these writers may simply be ignorant of the truth.But, just as bourgeois jurisprudence maintains that “ignorance of the law is no excuse”, thesewriters had better banish that ignorance by swotting up on the dialectic.

This recalls Engels’s remarks about Marx’s method “making the most difficult problems sosimple and clear that even bourgeois economists will now be able to grasp them”. xxviiiIndeed, now that we have used that very method to point the way, perhaps these bourgeoiswriters on the Telegraph, Guardian and elsewhere will be able to grasp the issues and desistfrom further inflicting their schoolgirl (or schoolboy) errors on the unsuspecting.

i “Tunisian Revolution”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Revolutionii “Egyptian Revolution of 2011”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_revolution_of_2011iii Patrick Cockburn, “The Arab Spring, five years on: A season that began in hope, but ended in desolation”, TheIndependent, 8 January 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-arab-spring-five-years-on-a-season-that-began-in-hope-but-ended-in-desolation-a6803161.htmliv Mohamed A El-Khawas, “Libya’s Revolution: A Transformative Year”, in The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw:Unfinished Revolutions and the Quest for Democracy, by John Davis (ed.), Routledge, 2013 8